Grow Asia Innovation Challenge for Climate-smart Agriculture

The Grow Asia Innovation Challenge aims to transform Southeast Asia’s agricultural landscape through climate-smart digital technologies, with an initial focus on Viet Nam and Cambodia. Backed by the Korean Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs and IFAD, its objective is to leverage farm-ready technologies to enable a smallholder-inclusive, climate-resilient agricultural transformation, empowering smallholder farmers to improve productivity, market access, and climate resilience. GAIC is not your generic accelerator.

The GAIC curates a pipeline of fit-for-purpose digital climate-smart agriculture solutions ready to launch in Southeast Asia, facilitates business-matching and strategic engagement between innovators and commercial partners, culminating in an in-person pitch event at the Grow Asia Investment Forum in October 2024 – all in the service of getting game-changing innovation into the hands of those who need it most to fight climate change at the source: smallholder farmers and their value chain partners.

The GAIC is part of the Smallholder Economic Empowerment through Digital Solutions (SEEDs) project aiming to directly benefit 12,000 smallholder beneficiaries (48,000 including family members) engaged in relevant farming systems in Cambodia, the Philippines, and Viet Nam. The SEEDS project intends to bridge the digital gap that characterizes the majority of smallholder farmers in Southeast Asia, and in turn, facilitate their access to the services required for the modernization of their farms and agri-enterprises. This will allow smallholder farmers to be integrated into the evolving digital technology landscape, and to achieve higher farm productivity and incomes.

The Challenge to Solve

• ​Marketability: Improve returns for low-emissions production through enhanced market access and premiums for smallholders & agri-SMEs engaging in sustainable agriculture practices.
• Carbon Marketplace Foundations: Broaden access to participation in credit mechanisms for emissions reduction through sustainable agricultural production.
• Digital Advisory Solutions: Improve access to and benefit from digital decision-making tools that enable the adoption of climate-smart agriculture practices across smallholders & agri-SMEs.

Benefits

• Grow Asia and Beanstalk are uniquely poised to build and empower a pipeline of market-ready digital climate-smart agriculture technologies to scale into agri-SME value chains across the region. Participating teams will benefit from the GAIC which includes:
  • Bespoke “go-to-market diagnostic” for growth in SE Asia, leveraging the proprietary Beanstalk AgTech tool
  • Opportunity to pitch to high-potential customers, investors, and partners at Grow Asia’s Investment Forum with 200+ attendees from 20+ countries in-person in Singapore
  • Receive growth service support from Grow Asia Innovation Challenge’s curated network
  • Human-Centered Design Training (in-person, if allowed; otherwise, virtual) which aims to bridge that gap, by helping the selected teams to improve the design of their existing or prototype solutions to better address farmers’ pain points. This could take place between 10th-30th August after the finalist(s) are determined.
  • Additional mentoring sessions will be provided to help innovators better shape their pitches to fit with the target audience.

Eligibility Criteria

• Any innovator who has a product or service in market that is solving climate-smart agriculture challenges, with an interest and intention to serve smallholder value chains in Southeast Asia.
• Eligibility criteria for applicants that are preferential but not required:
  • demonstrated applicability or adoption of the solution in a rice value chain
  • headquartered or active in Viet Nam, Cambodia, Philippines, and/or the Republic of Korea
  • registered as of the application submission time.

For more information, visit Grow Asia.